Maadili World

Created: 28 July 2015

I just finished the first draft of Maadili World. Note that it's not ready for prime time yet. It's just on the internet so we can have our data entry people work on getting the data in, without having to come to the office. We still need a design team to make it look great.

Maadili World is based on a book by Nicolai Peitersen called "The Ethical Economy". Nicolai is a Danish economist who worked for the Danish Central Bank, and later Morgan Stanley in London. He moved to Chengdu, Sichuan, China, and I happened to meet him walking in a park in Southwest Chengdu one day a little over a year ago.

Although the book is several years old now, a Chinese version was just published in 2014. The book talks about how the valuation of companies has changed over the years. Companies used to be valued on their sales, and their brick and mortar assets (ie... their profits and the value of their salable assets). That started to change when companies began building brands, and outsourcing and distributed manufacturing became the norm. Now, companies like Apple (currently the highest valued company in the world), own few if any factories but are valued highly.

In the world of social networking, a new factor was added to how companies are valued: Their Ethical Values. People in the green movement have been particularly effective at changing company values by boycotting polluters and buying from non-polluters. Ethical value investing has become main stream, and there is little doubt that the publics' perception of a companys ethical values affect both their sales and their valuation in the stock market.

Maadili World is our attempt at quantifying and measuring ethical values worldwide and feeding that information to companies so that they can better adjust their business practices to reflect the ethical values of their consumers, shareholders, lenders and the general public.

We believe strongly that companies who want to prosper need to continually adjust their ethical practices, and we feel that Maadili World will give the people a voice, and the companies the information they need to improve.

JCheckSecurity

Created: 23 August 2010

• Joomla
• Extension
• Security

I am currently developing a Joomla! 1.6 extension to check your Joomla! site and installed extensions for basic security.

As of now, this is the list of security checks it will make:

• Joomla! site check for an index.html file in every directory under the Joomla! root path.
• Joomla! site check for ownership and permissions for every directory and file under the Joomla! root path.
• Joomla! site check for the existence of JExec or die in every .php file under the Joomla! root path.
• Extension check for an index.html file in every directory under both the site and admin extension path.
• Extension check for ownership and permissions for every directory and file under both the site and admin extension path.
• Extension check for the existence of JExec or die in every .php file under both the site and admin extension path.

The extension will keep a record of every test it makes and you will be able to view the history of each test to make it easy to see if you are making progress or not.

Also, planned for this extension in the future is:

• A directory of Joomla! extensions and a rating of how well they perform on each test.
• Publicly available user comments and critiques
• A desktop application that connects to JCheckSecurity and runs tests from outside Joomla!

I will have version 1 of this extension available by the end of August (2010).

BG Double Adsense

Created: 14 December 2012

• Joomla
• Double
• AdSense
• Extension
• Javascript

You can use BG Double Adsense the same way you use the other Joomla! Adsense modules. IE - put your Google Adsense code into the module and display it the module position. BUT.... if you use a fixed width on your website (which most of us seem to do), BG Adsense can display extra Google Adsense "windows" alongside your normal body content, if the user's browser window is big enough.

BG Double Adsense works by injecting Javascript into your page. The Javascript compares the actual size of the browser window and then compares it to the size of your websites' body tags. It then decides if there is enough room between the body content and the edge of the browser window to display the Google Adsense ad you configured. If there is room for the ad to be fully displayed, a div tag is injected into the HTML, and the Google Adsense code is activated inside the new div.

US Zip Codes

Created: 07 January 2011

• Country
• SQL
• MySQL
• Code

Below is a link to a .csv file of U.S. Zip Codes. The fields (in order) are:

• id - just the id from my database
• zip_code - the 5 digit zip code
• cty_id - the Country Id (232 for U.S.)
• State_id - The Foreign Key for the State Table
• state_code - The 2 digit state code
• state_name - always null in this table because we use the State Table
• zip_latitude - roughly the center point of the state
• zip_longitude - roughly the center point of the state
• zip_geography - It's an object so unusable from this file
• city_name - the major city for this zip code

Enjoy:

uszipcodes.csv